Ricci flow deformsthe Riemannian metric proportionallyto the curvature, such that the curvatureevolves accordingto a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far. This work introduces the unified theoretic framework for discrete Surface Ricci Flow, including all the common schemes: Tangential Circle Packing, Thurston’s Circle Packing, Inversive Distance Circle Packing and Discrete Yamabe Flow. Furthermore, this work also introduces a novel schemes, Virtual Radius Circle Packing and the Mixed Type schemes, under the unified framework. This work gives explicit geometric interpretation to the discrete Ricci energies for all the schemes with all back ground geometries, and the corresponding Hessian matrices. The unified frame work deepens our understanding to the the discrete surface Ricci flow theory, and has inspired us to discover the new schemes, improved the flexibility and robustness of the algorithms, greatly simplified the implementation and improved the efficiency. Experimental results show the unified surface Ricci flow algorithms can handle general surfaces with different topologies, and is robust to meshes with different qualities, and is effective for solving real problems.

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In this paper, we introduce the first Aeppli-Chern class for complex manifolds and show that the $(1,1)$- component of the curvature $2$-form of the Levi-Civita connection on the anti-canonical line bundle represents this class. We systematically investigate the relationship between a variety of Ricci curvatures on Hermitian manifolds and the background Riemannian manifolds. Moreover, we study non-K\"ahler Calabi-Yau manifolds by using the first Aeppli-Chern class and the Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics. In particular, we construct explicit Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics on Hopf manifolds $\S^{2n-1}\times \S^1$. We also construct a smooth family of Gauduchon metrics on a compact Hermitian manifold such that the metrics are in the same first Aeppli-Chern class, and their first Chern-Ricci curvatures are the same and nonnegative, but their Riemannian scalar curvatures are constant and vary smoothly between negative infinity and a positive number. In particular, it shows that Hermitian manifolds with nonnegative first Chern class can admit Hermitian metrics with strictly negative Riemannian scalar curvature.